From calling rape 'bad sex' to Roseanne's vitriol, this was a jaw-dropping week

Posted May 31, 2018 10:34 a.m. EDT

By Holly Yan (CNN)

(CNN) — Just when you thought racist tirades and offensive speech couldn't get more outrageous, behold -- this week.

Roseanne Barr torpedoed her sitcom's future with her latest racist tweet, calling former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett a child of the Muslim Brotherhood and "Planet of the Apes."

That was followed by comedian Samantha Bee calling White House senior adviser and first daughter Ivanka Trump a "feckless c***."

And Australian feminist Germaine Greer sparked global outrage when she said most rapes are really just bad sex and shouldn't be punished too harshly.

Three famous women, three shocking comments, one realization: The boundaries of outrageous speech keeps getting pushed further.

Equating rape with 'bad sex'

Self-described "liberation feminist" Gemaine Greer stunned the world when she said some cases of rape are actually just "bad sex."

Greer made the remarks at the Hay literary festival Wednesday in the UK, where the author of "The Female Eunuch" was promoting an upcoming book.

Greer said she herself was raped when she was 18 years old and had not been "angry enough" with her attacker.

But she said rape generally isn't a "spectacularly violent crime" and suggested offenders be sentenced to 200 hours' community service and perhaps a conspicuous "r" tattoo.

"We are told it's one of the most violent crimes in the world -- bull****. Most rape is just lazy, just careless, just insensitive," she said, according to British media.

"Every time a man rolls over on his exhausted wife and insists on enjoying his conjugal right, he is raping her. It will never end up in a court of law," she said.

Greer tried to pre-emptively thwart the criticism she knew would follow.

"I can hear feminists screaming 'you're trivializing rape,' but we shouldn't live in terror of the penis," she said. "Why are we genuflecting in front of this poor little thing that needs all the help it can get."

But the condemnation was swift.

"I call for Germaine Greer to stop calling herself a feminist. Because she very clearly isn't. And the hailing of her as one needs to stop," Tanja Bueltmann tweeted. "It should have stopped a long time ago, really."

Samantha Bee calls Ivanka Trump a 'c***'

First daughter and White House senior adviser Ivanka Trump got a lot of heat last weekend for tweeting a photo of herself embracing one of her three children.

That's because the post came as word spread that federal officials had lost track of 1,500 immigrant children.

"Her disgusting comments and show are not fit for broadcast, and executives at Time Warner and TBS must demonstrate that such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned on its network," Sanders said.

Both CNN and TBS are owned by Turner, a subsidiary of Time Warner.

Bee apologized Thursday and acknowledged she had "crossed a line."

"I would like to sincerely apologize to Ivanka Trump and to my viewers for using an expletive on my show to describe her last night," she said. "It was inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it."

Roseanne blames Ambien for racist tweets

Perhaps the most high-profile vitriol hurled this week came from Roseanne Barr, who has a long history of inflammatory behavior.

Who can forget her spitting and grabbing her crotch after singing the national anthem? Or the pictures of her dressed as Hitler taking burnt, people-shaped cookies out of an oven?

This week, her Twitter rant was remarkable not just for its racist nature, but because of the swift response that followed.

Within hours, ABC canceled the reboot of her sitcom "Roseanne." And shortly after Barr declared she was leaving Twitter, she got back on to blame the prescription sleep aid Ambien for her behavior:

"guys I did something unforgiveable so do not defend me. It was 2 in the morning and I was ambien tweeting," Barr wrote.

She doubled down in another tweet, saying she has "done weird stuff while on ambien-cracked eggs on the wall at 2am etc --"

Sanofi, the maker of Ambien, debunked the notion that the drug leads to racist tweets.

"While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects," the company wrote, "racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication."